Language in Time of Revolution (review)

Book Reviews 103 linguistic usages and traditions, developed according to each writer's judgement, depending on his particular social and cultural background, and in line with his own ideas about the language" (p. 204). The final chapter on IH is regrettably thin in comparison to the other chapters. However, the author admits that he is providing only a summary account of IH, in part because IH breaks the pattern of the language's natural development (p. 51) and in part because the author does not wish to duplicate the fine analyses of Rosen and Kutscher (p. 281). With this work, Saenz-Badillos has made an extraordinary contribution to Hebrew philology that is in keeping with the high standard of the Spanish school. The volume's extensive bibliography (some 80 pages) is testimony to its tremendous value as a tool for both research and teaching. Christine Hayes Near Eastern Studies Department Princeton University Language in Time of Revolution, by Benjamin Harshav. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 234 pp. $25.00. Harshav's handsome volume is deceptively slim. Ambitious in its scope, it sets the revival of Hebrew within the context of (European) Jewish history within the larger context of world (European) history. Divided into three parts, the first two are interconnected essays previously published separately in Hebrew. They focus on the modernization of the Jewish people and the modernization of the Hebrew language. The third section, "Sources on the Hebrew Language Revival," is more of an appendix. Barbara Harshav's translations of significant essays enrich the preceding chapters. The author takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from social history, political forces and psychological considerations, literature and linguistics, to bring Itamar Even-Zohar's theory of polysystems to life. Harshav discusses the centrifugal and centripetal forces at work in modern Jewish history. The book itself is propelled simultaneously by similar forces, reaching many areas at once (digressions, parentheticals, examples, and anecdotes), and condensing massive amounts of information. The modernization of the Jews is shown to be a similar process to that in the rest of the west (Europe) albeit more intense, and also peculiarly Jewish in its extraterritoriality and its occasional movement against the current 104 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 (e.g., the Zionist push towards agriculture while other societies undergo urbanization). The book is written for a wide audience (explaining otherwise familiar terms such as aliyot, Pale of Settlement, Haskala), yet prior knowledge is helpful in understanding the densely packed chapters. The book displays a wealth of knowledge, enriching the linguistic and historic approaches with examples from the modern Hebrew literary canon. The style is more casual than traditional academic prose; Harshav deliberately refrains from "burdening the reader with endless details and footnotes" (p. ix). Harshav begins his book by describing Jews as disproportionately involved in the academy, trade, and other professions, consciously beginning with an issue he declares to be sensitive. The pace of the book mirrors the pace of change itself: within one generation Jews moved from a feudal society through capitalism to the electronic age, and Hebrew became the primary, or base, language for individuals and a society; the whole revolution is described in seventy-odd pages. The Zionist movement is presented in context, as one of many strategies to the issue of being Jewish in a changing world which include anarchism, socialism, parliamentarianism, revivalism, religious anti-Zionism, territorialism, etc. The negation aspect of Zionism and the Yishuv (not European, not assimilation, not socialism; Hebrew not Yiddish, nature not ghetto, youth not fathers) is emphasized. The concept of Hebrew as standing in opposition to the Diaspora is repeated throughout the text. Harshavexpands the idea of the secular polysystem, exploring the relation between the establishment of the State of Israel and the revival of the Hebrew language. The second section, detailing the revival of Hebrew, also serves as a larger statement about the function of language in society. For Jews to become a nation like others they needed land and a language. Hebrew was chosen over Yiddish, in part, because it was not the language of the Diaspora and because of its link to the land (and to sacred texts), and despite the paucity of vocabulary...